The Future of Recruitment: Unpacking Indeed's PPAS Model

End-to-end recruitment marketing and staffing agency
Get an unbiased perspective on your toughest recruitment challenges
Get the talent you want by giving candidates what they need
Improve recruitment outcomes and maximize the impact of your recruitment spend
Leverage your existing ATS to improve hiring process efficiency
Uncover your true employer brand and bring it to life
Attract better candidates, optimize media spend, and improve cost-per-hire
A comprehensive solution to recruiting with social media
Modern staffing solutions for employers
Job seekers: Browse openings
Subscribe to get fast, actionable insights for busy talent professionals
End-to-end technology partner for IT services, solutions, & support
End-to-end IT services and support options to suit the specific needs of your organisation
Minimise downtime by reducing exposure to unnecessary risk, business disruptions and disaster-level incidents
End-to-end cyber security protection means preparation on every level: having a combination of the right polices, technologies, awareness and support
Collaboration and communication solutions, along with cultural and analytical support to help redefine the way you work
Meet your corporate responsibility goals, protect the environment, and achieve your business objectives
Our Business and Technology Specialists will help you drive change and support you in taking your business to the next level
Confidently outsource with fixed pricing and quality guarantee
Fully-managed program to collapse, consolidate, migrates, disconnect, and recover legacy and dormant network assets
Expand coverage without added infrastructure; leverage engineering, order, support, and coordination services with partner carriers
A dedicated team focused on attention-to-detail increases efficiency, reduces costs, and improves customer satisfaction
End-to-end planning, implementation, maintenance, and coordination with partners to improve service delivery and rev recognition
Comprehensive circuit and network design services. Build, maintain, and optimize networks for revenue generation and growth
Configure network resources, secure remote access, validate circuits. Vendor-agnostic, experts in Cisco, Juniper, and more
Monitor, analyze, and test new services to ensure compatibility and adherence to standards
Flexible options: Hire experts hourly or opt for Managed Telecom to fully or partially manage your engineering teams and projects
Subscribe for relevant industry news, offers, and updates
The good news – Indeed’s pay-per-apply start model (PPAS) is working favorably for most industries and positions. In our early evaluation, a few weeks after its May 1st launch, we mentioned that the PPAS model had favorable results in the IT, engineering, and healthcare sectors. At that point we were hesitant to make a prediction about the restaurant industry’s performance.
The Wicresoft team has continued to keep a close eye on client campaigns to ensure that performance does not decrease, while costs increase. We quickly saw continued improvements to most campaigns.
The results overall have been favorable:
Evaluating industry-specific performance is crucial to understanding the model's effectiveness and making informed decisions. When we assess the results of campaigns, we take into consideration many conditions that will impact the job seeker volume – like the seasonality of hiring for the industry and the number of jobs posted.
Overall, we believe that the PPAS model is beneficial to most organizations using Indeed's platform. Instead of capturing job seekers who click on every job to evaluate the qualifications and having to pay for these "peepers," cost is only incurred for those candidates who want to apply for the position.
Another value of the PPAS model is not having to use budget for employers that continually search and click their own positions to ensure they are working correctly. We hear consistently from our Talent Acquisition partners that their Hiring Managers spend time reviewing their postings on Indeed. In the pay-per-click (PPC) model, this not only cost an organization part of its budget, but it also impacted the Indeed search algorithms as hiring managers are not job seekers and they do not:
Conducting searches where you take no action ensures that Indeed will no longer serve up your positions to you. Their algorithm is geared toward job seekers and is always looking to improve the results to get more clicks, so when you search for a position and don’t act on your listing, they consider you uninterested in that position and start to remove it from your view.
Talk about a sick cycle. If we can give any counsel on this, it is STOP the madness. If you want to know more, we cover this topic in detail in our Why Don’t I See My Jobs blog.
While still in beta and used for smaller Indeed customers, Indeed is working on a pay-per-qualified lead model. This format would allow employers 48-72 hours to review the applicants that have responded to their postings and determine if they have fully met the qualifications (employer pays for the application) or if they would like to decline the candidate, in which case the application cost is not deducted from their monthly allocation.
Indeed VP and GM, Maggie Hulce, stated, “The main advantage of a pay-per-application model over a pay-per-click model is the reduction of unqualified, uninterested, and even fraudulent "clicks" that the employer pays for. With the new model, the employer pays only for what is truly wanted—a qualified candidate.”
Pricing on either of these models is determined by labor market conditions for the job, including job location, job title, and available job seekers in the market. The more competitive the position and market, the more an employer will pay for the completed, qualified applications. We are expecting this model to be rolled out on a larger scale in 2024, once the nuances of accepting and declining candidates are determined with the applicant tracking systems.
The move to the PPAS model is a significant change to recruitment marketing, and one that is proving to be beneficial to a majority of the organizations using Indeed's platform. It is also the prequel to Indeed moving to a pay-per-apply model, where organizations are allowed to assess the applicant's quality before paying for it.
We encourage employers to work with their Talent Acquisition team or recruitment marketing agency to ensure that their campaigns are optimized for the PPAS model. If you have questions about optimizing your listings for the PPAS model, reach out to us!